Tracking the entire sweep of the middle ages across Europe, Wickham focuses on important changes century by century, including such pivotal crises and moments as the fall of the western Roman empire, Charlemagne’s reforms, the feudal revolution, the challenge of heresy, the destruction of the Byzantine empire, the rebuilding of late medieval states, and the appalling devastation of the Black Death. Yet distinguished historian Chris Wickham has taken up the challenge in this landmark book, and he succeeds in producing the most riveting account of medieval Europe in a generation. Not easily chronicled within the scope of a few hundred pages. The millennium between the breakup of the western Roman empire and the Reformation was a long and hugely transformative period – one Here my aim is to figure out, not only how the Mediterranean economy worked in this period, but also how the logic(s) of pre-capitalist economic systems operated on the ground.įeatured Publication - Medieval Europe (October 2016) I am using archaeology, legal documents and letters, to try to get at how regional exchange fits together with long-distance exchange.

My current research focusses on the Mediterranean in a long eleventh century and the development of exchange/commercial patterns in that period, from Spain to Egypt web-based publications of Egyptian texts, and some notably active archaeology in both Spain and Sicily, have very recently made this possible. I have worked on a range of topics in medieval history: detailed rural/regional analyses in an Annales tradition, and also urban histories, of Italy up to the early thirteenth century comparative history, of socio-economic and socio-political patterns, particularly in late Antiquity and the early middle ages, but later on as well socio-legal history the study of social memory in Europe and more widely and the interface between history and archaeology. Comparative European, Mediterranean and global medieval history.I retired from Oxford in 2016 after eleven years here, but maintain my Oxford connections.

Medieval europe christopher wickham